The conventional manner in which a patent application is drafted most often involves obtaining an invention disclosure from an inventor and manually synthesizing this information into a specification, claims, and drawings. This process is laborious, often expensive, and can vary widely depending on the complexity of the disclosure materials.
Various efforts have been made to increase efficiency with respect to the drafting process. One common approach is to provide written forms for both a patent draftsman and the inventor. The written form or invention disclosure form provided to the inventor may be arranged to extract information that the inventor may not have considered, including abstractions of a specific invention to a more general description of the invention. Such a form may also provide a roadmap of sorts for the draftsman to arrange the specification and claims. Even with the help of a disclosure form, the conventional approach to drafting a patent application ultimately involves a significant amount of manual synthesize of the disclosure information by the patent draftsman and significant manual effort to author the specification and claims.
Another type of form often utilized in the drafting process is a patent template that includes several pre-written sections and headings to facilitate efficiency in drafting the application. However, similar to the shortcomings of the invention disclosure form, the actual drafting process involves significant manual effort to author the specification and claims.